it. When they saw he had no more to give, they went away.
The great fantasy of Christmas still kept him devout. Gant was his unwearied comrade; night after night in the late autumn and early winter, he would scrawl petitions to Santa Claus, listing interminably the gifts he wanted most, and transmitting each, with perfect trust, to the roaring chimney. As the flame took the paper from his hand and blew its charred ghost away with a howl, Gant would rush with him to the window, point to the stormy northern sky, and say: “There it goes! Do you see it?”
He saw it. He saw his prayer, winged with the stanch convoying winds, borne northward to the rimed quaint gabels of Toyland, into frozen merry Elfland; heard the tiny silver anvil-tones, the deep— lunged laughter of the little men, the stabled cries of aerial reindeer. Gant saw and heard them, too.
He was liberally dowered with bright-painted gimcracks upon Christmas Day; and in his heart he hated those who advocated “useful” gifts. Gant bought him wagons, sleds, drums, horns—best of all, a small fireman’s ladder wagon: it was the wonder, and finally the curse, of the neighborhood. During his unoccupied hours, he lived for months in the cellar with Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs: they strung the ladders on wires above the wagon, so that, at a touch, they would fall in accurate stacks. They would pretend to doze in their quarters, as firemen do, would leap to action suddenly, as one of them imitated the warning bell: “Clang— a-lang-a-lang.” Then, quite beyond reason, Harry and Max yoked in a plunging team, Eugene in the driver’s seat, they would leap out through the narrow door, gallop perilously to a neighbor’s house, throw up ladders, open windows, effect entries, extinguish imaginary flames, and return oblivious to the shrieking indictment of the housewife.
For months they lived completely in this fantasy, modelling their actions on those of the town’s firemen, and on Jannadeau, who was the assistant chief, child-proud over it: they had seen him, at the sound of the alarm, rush like a madman from his window in Gant’s shop, leaving the spattered fragments of a watch upon his desk, and arriving at his duty just as the great wagon
